Val’s Toy Chest- SDCC Wrap-Up- I Love the 80s

Hey readers, I’m back with my wrap up of the San Diego toy news I’ve shared with you over the past few weeks. This week the focus will be on ’80s properties that will have new product out between now and 2016. Some of these will be available in-store while others will only be sold online.

80’s nostalgia seems like it will never really go away and the licenses I will discuss today definitely feed into that mentality. Properties like Ghostbusters, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Masters of the Universe and Thundercats still capture the imagination and adoration of fans of all ages which is a testament to their longevity. Ghostbusters will get an extensive toyline courtesy of Diamond Select Toys which will incorporate the monsters that NECA did in their brief line along with the live-action main characters that Mattel was able to market on their MattyCollector website. Prototypes of Janine, Gozer, Dana as Zuul and Peter Venkman were the highlights of DST’s display for me. NECA continues their 8″ NOES line with a Dream Warriors Freddy that has the “souls of the children” on his torso. NECA also revealed that they are redoing their popular 8-bit Jason without the glow-in-the-dark feature but with musical packaging and the disembodied head of Pamela Voorhees as seen in the original Nintendo Friday the 13th game. Available in-store now from NECA are the 8″ Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives and Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.

MattyCollector/Mattel has been issuing He-Man and She-Ra toys on their collector’s website for the past few years and next year should be no different. Mattel is wrapping up their Masters of the Universe Classics line this year with the last of the vintage remakes from the 1983-1987 line and will continue to expand the canon next year with the 200X characters as well as the short-lived New Adventures cartoon and even up to the current DC Comics series. If you were a fan of the Filmation series, they also showed off a bunch of prototypes for cartoon accurate figures of He-Man, Skeletor and the like. These look as if they could have walked right off your TV screen. Thundercats will get similar MattyCollector treatment with sculpts by the Four Horsemen and styling like the MOTU Classics figures. Lion-O and Jackalman were the first two figures shown. The above figures are scheduled to be exclusive to the MattyCollector website, though I mention them here in this column since it is definitely of interest. Mezco also announced a new Tygra figure to go with their previous line of Mega-Scale Thundercats figures.

Not a lot of noteworthy items coming in this week though we will be getting a small restock on Funko’s Star Trek: The Next Generation POPs including Captain Picard and Data. Over the past week we have also gotten a restock on key Star Wars Black pieces like Darth Vader and the Stormtrooper which are both still available as of this writing. The awesome Entertainment Earth exclusive Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel Legends Comic 5 pack is now available in store and features comic book versions of the stars of last summer’s blockbuster movie. We’ve also received some of the EE exclusives from SDCC including a Star Trek Bobblehead 5 pack featuring the Captains, a couple of Mike Tyson Mysteries figures, a Big Bang Theory 3 3/4″ Two Pack and a Flash Gordon 3 3/4″ Two Pack.

On a comic AND ’80’s related note the next issue of IDW’s Jem and the Holograms comic book will be out this week and continues the first arc of the series. We’ll get to see the aftermath of the Misfits’ sabotage on Jem and the Holograms’ first live concert and whatever story developments arise from that event. I personally can’t wait to see what happens between Kimber and Stormer.